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COLLAPSE OF THE LEDBURY ROAD WALL
In February 2002 the contractor was working on underpinning the east and west walls of the building. These 60 foot high walls had been built in Victorian times by throwing down a few bricks on the clay and then constructing the high walls, which probably relied on the balcony and roof structures to stabilise them. Incendiary bombs falling in Ledbury Road in the war may also have weakened the west wall structure. Certainly cracks were visible in the upper part of the structure around the corner adjacent to the octagonal tower.
The underpinning was being done by digging out 2 metre sections under the wall and filling with concrete. The north end of the wall was destabilised by this procedure. Fortunately the collapse occured with enough warning for workers to clear the area, before a section of the wall fell into the site, but falling masonry did cause some limited damage by knocking a hole in the living room wall of the building to the north. The site and the adjacent road was cleared. However the supporting scaffolding intend to stabilise the wall during the underpinning resulted in the initial falling section destabilising the rest of the wall. So a couple of hours later, the entire wall collapsed. The photographs and story were taken up by the London Evening Standard that day.
Many locals were concerned that the collapse was deliberate, but it certainly was not in the project’s interest for the wall to fall down, as the whole project was delayed for 6 months while new planning permission was obtained to disassemble the east wall for safety, and to reconstruct both walls in the original form after the steel frame and floors were constructed. The masonry was carefully collected into steel bins and removed from the site for later reconstruction.
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